You may find it difficult to believe, but the people who work at Microsoft are people just like you. They have goals and get caught up in the whims of management, who are also people who get caught up in the whims of various things at various times.
I’m sure the engineers are nice people. But it would suck to have to compromise design to make the crappy stuff that just randomly eats processors.
This would make me sad and fortunately, I think engineers have a lot of choice over where they work. So if people are consciously building this stuff then I think it’s more likely that they drank the koolaid and agree than they are forced against their will to be crappy.
The employees at Microsoft, sure. Microsoft-the-company, i.e. the board and management? Nope. Or otherwise, explain to me where the myriads of nagscreens, the push for locked, hardwired bootloaders, the embrace/extend/extinguish stance and the general anticompetitive behaviour comes from. (Not even starting with all the tracking).
SecureBoot comes from wanting a secure boot process. If you’ve ever had a rootkit or boot sector virus you understand what this is for. If you hate Microsoft you say that SecureBoot is stealing your freedom or something else equally insane.
Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do. Do not single out Microsoft for putting ads for their own products in their own products, because Microsoft weren’t the first to do this, they weren’t even the millionth company to do this. Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
If you’re a developer you understand telemetry. If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
> If you hate Microsoft you say that SecureBoot is stealing your freedom or something else equally insane.
Secure Boot itself is perfectly sensible, for the reasons you describe. What's not sensible is hardwiring a key so that not even the user itself can change it.
> Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do [...] Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
I can't think of any other operating system that has nag screens built in (as opposed to "hey, look at this new feature" toasts, which are also annoying but at least not deliberately designed to block your workflow).
> You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
I'll give you that. I was actually thinking about the historical stuff here, but, true, that doesn't have to reflect current strategy.
> If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
I can get just as angry about "telemetry" from other companies, no worries. To a certain degree, it's a useful improvement for the development process. What I see not as legitimate is e.g. using telemetry data to train AI, or give no options to turn off collection. Microsoft does the first e.g. with handwriting recognition, the second with "mandatory" information.
You're absolutely right that all of those are industry-wide trends where the competition is no better. I think where Microsoft is currently special however is the pure manner of aggressiveness of their nagscreens. It's also a difference if you implement this stuff in an application that the user can uninstall or directly in the OS.
> Secure Boot itself is perfectly sensible, for the reasons you describe. What's not sensible is hardwiring a key so that not even the user itself can change it.
Users CAN change the key. If you have a motherboard that doesn’t allow that, that’s on you and/or the hardware vendor, not Microsoft.
No, sorry. If you work for Microsoft you've lost me. That takes a departure from any kind of ethics. I'm fine with it, people want to get paid. But you do this sort of thing if you don't care about the world of software or where it is headed. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it definitely applies to them.
The company's vision as a whole is to throw some effort at everything and write off what turns out crap. Everyone I knew was on board with that. I was not. That's not a vision, that's distributed incompetence.
You may find it difficult to believe, but the people who work at Microsoft are people just like you. They have goals and get caught up in the whims of management, who are also people who get caught up in the whims of various things at various times.